


Contingency Planning

by FloraStuart



Category: White Collar
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-24
Updated: 2012-07-24
Packaged: 2017-11-10 14:25:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/467311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FloraStuart/pseuds/FloraStuart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Safety has always been an illusion for the likes of them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Contingency Planning

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for 4.02. Set immediately after the episode. Because I wanted a Neal and June reunion.

June hears that cane tapping on the stairs outside and it’s like Byron is back; it was his, once, classic ebony with a silver head. Spring rain dots the shoulders of Neal’s suit as he walks in, speckles the sidewalk and the front stoop. A breath of wind blows in after him, heavy with the scent of an approaching storm.

He looks weary but he manages a real smile for her; he’s spent too much time on his feet today, she can guess, but wouldn’t sit down more than necessary.

He insisted on his old room and she didn’t argue, though the house has more than one guest room on the ground floor that could have been dusted and made ready in no time at all. With everything that’s happened, with all the uncertainty still surrounding his future, he needs to be in familiar surroundings, even if that means negotiating a long flight of stairs with a cane.

The dark patch on his thigh, soaked into charcoal-grey silk, is not from rain.

“You’re bleeding again,” she says, as he leans in to kiss her cheek. He glances down and she sees something in his shoulders loosen, as if he realizes abruptly he’s in a place where he can afford to notice such things. Only with her will he let his face twist that way, or lean so heavily on the cane. She puts a hand on his arm, guides him toward the back parlor. Draws the blinds and turns up the lamp on the end table.

The front parlor is for guests, with the Steinway and the silk sofa and the hand-carved walnut grandfather clock; the back is for family. The armchairs are brown leather, worn butter-soft and molded to the shapes of their bodies from so many long nights before the fire. The paneling is real wood, stained dark and polished to a high sheen; the poker and tongs by the cold hearth are black iron with handles of antique silver. But the paintings hung in here hold only sentimental value.

The landscape, wheatfields and a rumpled scarecrow, she'd seen at an art show in some small town whose name she can’t remember; it was an expensive purchase, when she and Byron were both young and poor. Over the mantel a tall ship leans hard over in a storm, yellowed sails filled and straining, dipping almost to meet the bruised blue-grey waves; she’d seen it at an artist’s stall on a boardwalk during some beach vacation somewhere. A poster of a Monet hangs beside the window; she’d seen that one at a shop in the mall when she was barely twenty-two.

There is the portrait of Samantha Neal painted, one long rainy summer afternoon while Samantha fidgeted and kept running over to the window to see if the sun was back; she wouldn’t sit still until Neal started telling stories about some old job; Bugsy knocked over the paints soon after and ran through the house all the way out the back door, leaving pawprints in thick blue and red oil paint along the hall floor.

The dark mahogany bookcase with the rippled glass doors holds only paperback romances and mystery novels; she and Mozzie had their book club discussions in here, once.

The housekeeper knocks lightly and sets the tea tray on a stand beside the mantel, rich black tea with a twist of orange peel steeping in the pot, beside a plate of chocolate-covered shortbread cookies. June pours for both of them as Neal peels off his jacket. He drops heavily into Byron’s old chair like he belongs there, wrapping his hands around the delicate china cup and inhaling fragrant steam.

A wet wind through the window, cracked slightly open, stirs the blinds with a clatter.

“Some gauze and alcohol, please, Helen,” she tells the housekeeper, ignoring Neal’s surprised look and his slight headshake. And then, once she has the first-aid kit and Helen has shooed Bugsy out and closed the door, “Let me see.”

He shakes his head again. “You don’t have to -”

She stops him with a look, firm but gentle; he subsides, abashed, standing on one leg to slide his pants off and drape them over the arm of the chair. The tiny green light on his ankle glares balefully at her, reminds her that even here, in her private parlor, in the sanctuary of her home, he isn’t truly safe.

But safety has always been an illusion for the likes of them.

“I’ve treated a few gunshot wounds in my day,” she tells him, pulling up a footstool to sit in front of him as he sinks back into the armchair. One in this very parlor, more than twenty years ago; she was no doctor, but she could make a fair line of stitches when she had to, and sterilize it all with bootleg whiskey.

The ragged hole in the front of his thigh has already soaked through the old gauze, fresh red mixing with old dried rust-brown; she tries tugging gently and it sticks. Neal hisses softly.

“Ow,” he says, and it means _I trust you_. The gauze comes off with a quick pull; doing this slowly will not help. The wound was clean, tearing through muscle but missing the big artery and the bone.

“The report said you were trying to escape.”

“June.” And it’s a flash of a real smile, there and then gone, though his face is grey in the yellow lamplight. “You’d be disappointed in me if I hadn’t tried.”

She pours alcohol onto a fresh gauze pad, dabbing at the wound as he sucks in a sharp breath; the skin around the stitches is blotched and sticky with drying blood, but the stitches themselves aren’t torn and she sees no signs of infection.

“True,” she says. Once she’s sure it’s clean, she presses dry gauze against the line of stitches, listens to him breathing, strained but steady. “There’s whiskey, if you still don’t want to take the pills.”

“No.” He’s refused all painkillers since he’s been back; refused them on the plane, even, and spent what must have been an excruciating eighteen-plus hours on a commercial flight from the Canary Islands, barely able to move his leg the whole time.

But between the leg wound and the anklet he’s vulnerable enough; no matter how much pain he’s in, he won’t dull his reflexes further with alcohol or narcotics.

“I wasn’t running.”

“I didn’t think so.” Her hand is wet, blood soaking through the first layer of gauze, and she adds another. The hissing rush of rain outside is loud in the stillness that follows.

“I was in a cell. Backed in a corner.” He looks away, staring at the tray on the stand, the tea cooling in the silver pot. “He was standing right in front of me.”

She sets the bottle of alcohol on the end table before she drops it. She adds another layer of gauze and presses harder, watching him bite down on his lower lip. Collins won’t be punished for this.

_His word against Neal’s_ , Peter said, his face tight with suppressed fury, but they both know any competent board of inquiry will look at a clean wound in the front of a man’s thigh and see Collins is lying. 

_Hell of a marksman, to hit a running target in the leg_ , she’d remarked acidly when Peter told her. _Was he running_ backwards, _when he was shot?_ The board will see, but they won’t care; the feds will close ranks and protect their own, truth and justice be damned.

She stares at her hands pressed hard against Neal’s leg, at the blood still seeping through; she closes her eyes and that’s worse. She can see him, trapped against steel bars, alone and afraid and in pain. She swallows back hot tears of helpless rage, propping Neal’s foot on the stool beside her while she tapes the gauze in place. Her boy was shot not because he ran, not even because they wanted to hurt him, but only for convenience.

And she can’t even tell him he’s safe here. She can’t tell him it’s over; she can’t tell him no one will hurt him like that again.

All she can tell him is that she’ll hurt anyone who tries to come and take him tonight. It’s the truth, but she doubts he’ll find comfort in it.

So she only says, “I can have a fire laid, if you want.”

“It’s all right.” He leans his head back against soft leather, stretching his leg out, still propped on the footstool; he settles himself carefully, his face taut and pale as he shifts, trying to find the least painful position. “Just -”

His eyes meet hers only briefly before sliding away again to stare at the painting over the mantel, but it’s enough; _don’t go_ , he’s saying.

She stands stiffly; she’s getting old to be patching gunshot wounds. This part of the life she didn’t miss. 

She picks up a throw draped over the back of her chair, rich cream-colored angora, and tucks it around him before moving to close the window. Outside the rain beats steadily against the window ledges, splashing on the sidewalk as sunset fades to grey twilight. It’s spring, now, but the evenings can still be cool.

He says, in a thin quiet voice, “I missed you.”

She gives him a small smile, coming to sit in the other armchair; she knows it’s true, but she also hears what he doesn’t say. He doesn’t say _I’m glad to be back_.

“Peter’s been reassigned,” he says, very softly. And all her anger drains away, replaced by something cold.

“And you?” she asks, though she knows the answer; it’s a knot of ice settling in her stomach. “Are you going with him?”

He shakes his head; she can see real fear in his eyes.

“Oh, darling.” It’s barely a whisper. Peter would have made many enemies, going as far as he’s gone to protect Neal. He made a deal to bring Neal back to New York on that anklet, in return for one of the FBI’s most wanted fugitives. And he’d have been thinking only of Neal, when that deal was made, and not of himself; he’d never have thought to ask for any assurances about his own future, any recognition for his own role in capturing MacLeish. It was as selfless as it was short-sighted; in sacrificing himself for Neal, he’s left Neal in a far more vulnerable position than ever before.

Peter can’t protect him, now. And as long as he’s on the anklet he can’t protect himself; he can’t run and he can’t hide. He’s a sitting target for Kramer or Collins or whoever decides to come after him next.

She allows herself the space of two breaths to panic, before taking a firm hold of her own emotions; standing, she wipes the blood from her hands. “All right,” she says. There are sixteen different ways out of this house; ten of those, she’s sure the feds don’t know about. Four of those are unstable tunnels that might collapse at any moment, which leaves six. “We’ll make a plan.” She holds his eyes until he swallows, nodding. “A backup, just in case -”

She rings the tiny brass bell for the housekeeper, a loud note in the still parlor above the lashing of rain outside; she asks for Neal’s sketchpad and some pencils, and when Helen returns with them June tells her to lay the fire anyway.

They’ll need it, once they’ve sketched out as many possible escape plans as they can.

“I missed you, too,” she says, once the door is closed and Helen gone. She missed him every day, with a fierce ache she hadn’t known since the first days after Byron passed; she listened for him at the door, caught herself halfway up the stairs to his loft, more times than she could count, before she remembered he was gone. 

But she won’t say _I’m glad you’re back_ ; she wishes desperately he was elsewhere. Anywhere. Free.

Safe.

New York won’t be safe for Neal much longer.


End file.
